Health care executives most highly compensated

On average, CEOs for HMOs and other health care companies receive two thirds more compensation than their counterparts in other industries, according to the Crystal Report on Executive Compensation. In studying compensation packages for over 1,500 CEOs, Crystal found that the people at the top of HMOs and health care companies live better than CEOs in the consumer, pharmaceutical, and finance industries.

Crystal put each CEO into an industry category; 31 categories had sufficient data to allow industry-to-industry comparisons of executive compensation packages, after adjusting for company size and shareholder-return performance. From these 31 industries, a baseline was developed. The average adjusted compensation for all CEOs in an industry was then compared with the baseline.

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